I find myself reconciled to feminism

For the best part of this last decade, the very word feminism was enough to cause my teeth to grind and the veins in my eyes twitch. I’ve outlined my reasonspreviously.

Yet here I find myself thoroughly reconciled with it. It’s strange, but there it is.

I haven’t changed my opinion of feminists, mind you. Western feminists that is. People like Anita Sarkeesian, Laurie Penny, Amanda Marcotte et al still strike me as thoroughly loathesome and pointless. They are “those that never ripened and rotted on the branch”, and I can hope for the strong wind that blasts them from the tree. No, I’m still consistent on that.

Simply put, as awful as people like Marcotte are, they would be far worse under just about any other system. I have previously floated the idea that had they been born under different stars, they’d have been like Sigrid Hunke and Isle Koch. Or like Imelda Marcos.

If you want to see my, imagine someone like Sarkeesian as the spoiled and narcissistic wife or mistress of some caudillo. Or, for the neoreactionaries, imagine her as Anne Boleyn. Just try to imagine the kind of chaos and suffering such types would cause in that circumstance. It doesn’t bear thinking about. Contrast that with today – by and large the narcissists that are western feminists are a bloody nuisance, but they are not getting innocents lynched, whipping up race hatred, or inflaming wars. That is what such types would have done at most any time in history.

Read the Iliad. Achilles and Helen are both described as “god like”. That isn’t complimentary; what it means is that they are willing and able to follow their whims without any concern for other human beings, and do not care who suffers or dies because of them. Narcissists, in other words. Of course, men and women are different, and so awful men are awful in a different way from awful women. Achilles is a monster who lives only for war and slaughter, and has no joy beyond it. Helen quite enjoys that she is so beautiful that she can tear the known world apart, and leave Troy a burning ruin.

The world today… is really kinda great

I don’t think you can ever get to a state where some proportion of humanity isn’t just irredeemably dreadful. What you have to plan for is a system where the damage such people can do is minimized. And here we really need to be grateful to feminism, in its full, historic sense.

Manospherites and Neoreactionaries are motivated by a disgust of bullying, venomous narcissists. They are fooling themselves, however, if they think that under some system that subordinated women they would have been better off. In those systems, women still exercised power – through men.

And not small amounts of power, either. The thing about the Helen legend is how you can find ones like it all over human history. Think of Cleopatra, playing off Caesar and the Mark Anthony. Think of Diaochan inciting Luu Bu and Dong Xhu against each other. Think of Aisha, who helped lay the basis of the Sunni/Shia schism that is still killing people today.

There is a great moment in the webcomic SomethingPositive where the main character Davan confronts an anarchist:

You want anarchy?! This is anarchy! Where the stronger rule the weak, and guess where your place is, Pugsley? Anarchy is your sixth grade gym class for all eternity!

I’ve said before that there is no difference between Western feminists mocking shy nerds and a cheerleader getting the jock she’s fucking to beat them up. Now scale that up by fifty orders of magnitude, and that is what you would really have in a reactionary society.

The effect of feminism, of women’s emancipation, has does something great – it has eliminated, or at least strongly minimized, such types. One of the many great things about women’s emancipation is that women no longer need to cultivate that power. Far fewer find themselves shoved into loveless marriages with no way to escape, and turning to spite as their only salve. More importantly, women do not need to band reflexively behind someone who has a scrap of power.

Only a minority of women in the West now identify with the label of feminism, and far fewer with what Western feminism actually is like – because they have the option of simply getting on with their lives. They see the poisonous, senseless lives that prominent feminists live – and decide they want no part of it. This is a wonderful thing for all concerned, men and women both.

This is a great thing.

So – yeah. Three cheers for feminism!

Clogging up the works

There is, however, one way in which the rabble that are Western feminists are really bad. They are poisoning and sabotaging a good movement at a time when we desperately need a serious movement dedicated to women’s emancipation.

Fortunately, with the rise of the Rest, there is a new breed of tougher, better men and women willing to shoulder this burden. Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Nonie Darwish. Sabatina James. Wafa Sultan. And so on.

Thank you, nice insight. But when you say “Three cheers for feminism!” towards the end, are you cheering for the feminism that secured women’s emancipation (which, surely, any decent person must consider a good thing) or for the Western feminism we see today (which you say you have become reconciled to)? Wasn’t too clear.

roe

I want to offer… not a counter – because I fundamentally agree with the central thesis – but a supplemental point.

Looking at how the manosphere understand how gender relations are going wrong in the West will (I submit) help us understand the consequences of Western intervention in the Islamic world on the gender system there.

When you put a spotlight on *feminist* extremists, you leave in the darkness the massive pull that *feminism* has on Western institutions & culture.

When you put a spotlight on reactionary manospherians, you leave in the darkness progressive manospherians – which from what’s I’ve seen are in the majority, represented by MRAs and MGTOWs (most PUAs are apolitical). These factions are *specifically* anti-traditionalist.

So, what is the progressive manosphere say? It says feminism is a movement focused on maintaining traditional structures which benefit women, while advocating for change in areas that are detrimental to women. In other words, they are dedicated to gender imbalance – which is why default shared custody in the event of marriage dissolution isn’t law of the land, why low-status, dangerous jobs are still done by men while women demand more representation in high-status jobs, why boko harem kidnapping girls was front page news while boko harem burning a schoolhouse full of boys was non-news, &etc.

The progressive manosphere (I submit) recognizes the essential homoeostatic balance that forms a stable gender system – coverture law dictated that a woman’s property & legal rights were subsumed under her husbands, but it also dictates the husband is legally responsible for any acts of fraud or theft perpetrated by the wife. Whatever we may think of coverture now, it was a stable trade-off between rights & responsibilities.

Under sharia law a husband is held financially responsible for the maintenance of wife & children, while the wife has the right to own property and wealth in her own right which she can use or spend as she likes. So every girl who goes to school, and every women who works, is literally taking money and opportunity from men who are over-burdened with obligations towards their family. We can’t possibly intervene in the Muslim gender system -except to badly imbalance it like we have in the West – if we only pay attention to the lack rights for women, and not the over-abundance of responsibilities for men.

davek99

I’m unconvinced that modern 1st world feminism is quite so mostly harmless, not considering the laws they’re successfully campaigned for, or the censorship, repression and moral panic they promote through their scaremongering. I’ve seen real people, men and women, harmed as a consequence of feminist dogma and the actions of feminist zealots.

Of course, like a lot of things in the world today, it could all be a hell of a lot worse…